The Town & The City: Origins & Reunions

By David Perry

The gang’s all here.

On this Saturday night, the final evening of the three-day Town & The City Festival, The Attic of The Worthen feels particularly like a clubhouse, packed with old friends. Their numbers, like hairlines, have thinned over the years.

But it’s clear to anyone packed into the room – Poorhouse still matters.

The set by the Poorhouse Records Allstars celebrates a homespun label that captured a snapshot of Lowell’s 1990s music scene and offered a learning space. The name? Simple – everyone was broke. But the musical clan that formed around it spun a thread that still runs through the Mill City more than three decades later.

Town and The City festival producer Chris Porter (right) chatting with Poorhouse fan Mike Flynn. Photo courtesy of Jeff Caplan.

It’s just a small part of The Town and The City Festival, producer Chris Porter’s annual feast of music in his hometown. Over three days (April 30-May 2) 50 acts play 13 stages in Mill City venues.

The seventh edition of the festival included L.A. punk pioneer and X frontman John Doe, Steve Wynn of Dream Syndicate/Baseball Project, David Lowery of Cracker and Boston mainstay Tanya Donnelly, this time with Chris Brokaw and their madrigal-based project. Bigger names are mixed with regional and local acts. And always local acts. Western Education, The Evolutionists and Lowell’s hot young band The Ghouls among them.

It sounded like a bit of everything. The Ghouls covering Black Sabbath, complete with roaring, distorted guitars, black dusters and oversize crosses, a bumper crop of “bummer pop” by Future Teens. hip-hop and soul with The Evolutionists, an evening of comedy at Cobblestones, electric blues from GA-20, folk, jazz, funk and more. And at LaLa Books, Chris Wrenn talked up his book Fenway Punk.

Two Saturday shows, the Poorhouse Allstars and The Deliriants (down the street at Thirsty First) were reunions. The Deliriants billed their set as a “last ever” gig.

Poorhouse

Poorhouse began in 1993 with a weekly open mic session and continued with a CD compilation that highlighted a crop of talented songwriters and performers. Several continue to make music. Frank Morey, who sings gruff folk-blues, funk-soul woman Jen Kearney and Dee Tension, the former rapper now fronting a rock band D-Tension & The Secrets, who had to cancel a Town the City slot a couple weeks before this year’s fest.

In an era of DIY, Poorhouse was the epitome of doing it yourself. Its dual heartbeat was Scott Pittman and Kevin Stevenson. Chops? These are guys who once led a band through a set of Motown songs done as ska.

They met in 1984, recalls Stevenson.

“I’d heard about this great drummer right in Tewksbury, over on Whipple Road. So I went over to his house, knocked on the door and said hey, my name is Kevin Stevenson, I’m putting together a speed metal band and I heard you’re a great drummer.”

Pittman sized up the visitor.

“I hate that shit,” he said.

A few years later, the duo played in Duck Duck, a band unafraid to explore any style of music.

“That was ’89 to ‘93,” recalls Stevenson. “That was one great band. And fun. We were having the time of our lives, non-stop, A musical family.”

Though he has lived with multiple sclerosis since 1999, Stevenson remains one of the finest musicians to ever play the Mill City. He toured with the Mighty Mighty Bosstones during their ‘90s heyday, played in a band with Weezer frontman Rivers Cuomo.

The Shods slam into “Mill City,” with (from left) bassist Eric Faulkner, singer/guitarist Kevin Stevenson and drummer Scott Pittman. Photo courtesy of Jeff Caplan.

But his legacy rests squarely with the punk-garage-rock band he and Pittman led, The Shods, known across the region for blistering live sets and a Clash-like energy. They were attracting record label attention when Stevenson’s diagnosis dropped.

It put the brakes on the Shods. Stevenson could no longer consistently perform as he had before. The explosive shows they were known for were gone. (He is feeling “pretty good for a couple of months after a run of feeling crappy.”)

“Man, he can play the guitar,” says George Zacharakis, singer/guitarist for The Deliriants. “On a good night, no one could touch him.” (Members of The Deliriants also played supporting roles on Poorhouse recordings.)

And this reunion is a good night, with Stevenson peeling off snarling blues and country licks, rockabilly riffs, crunchy rock.

Pittman opens the set on guitar and vocals with “Art is the Handmade of Human Good,” a ballad he penned based on Lowell’s motto. (The Shods were always proudly, unabashedly of Lowell. They wrote songs about the city, mentioned their roots in interviews and titled their 1993 debut EP I’m in Lowell, MA.)

Known for his wit and an ability to present himself in new ways each year, Pittman is the lone artist who has played every Town and The City fest.

“He’s the one act I want to play every year,” says Porter. “He’s such a character, a local legend and he brings something fresh each time.”

The Festival

Festival producer and Lowell native Porter, 60, first had visions of “some form of” this festival more than a decade ago, after his time programming Seattle’s massive Bumbershoot fest ended. He lived in Seattle but was soon trekking between coasts, booking Once Ballroom in Somerville. (His professional life has only become busier, as he now helps produce San Francisco’s Hardly Strictly Bluegrass fest and is programming director for the historic Sweetwater Music Hall, across the bay in Mill Valley.)

He ventured to many of the annual, Austin-based South by Southwest festivals and wondered if Lowell’s downtown club scene could support a festival where fans would pay a single price to enjoy a cobblestone and concrete smorgasbord of acts in multiple venues over multiple days and nights.

“One pass for all the shows,” he says over coffee at Nibbana Café one drizzly morning a month before the festival. “I looked at Zorba Room, Warp & Weft, Uncharted and other places. I loved the idea of people just going from venue to venue, offering a variety of acts to choose from.”

He wanted to give his hometown something to savor and brand it with “a Kerouacian name” in tribute to the late Lowell scribe. The Town and The City is a nod to Lowell native Jack Kerouac’s first, Lowell-centric tome.

“I saw Lowell as a growing creative community,” Porter says.

The festival debuted in 2018 and save for a couple of COVID-era skips, has become an annual event.

“The first year proved we could do it, but it was quite a monetary investment. We did it again and it grew. If I keep seeing growth, I’ll keep doing it.” What would really sustain the festival, he says, are sponsorships, donations and grants. Such support in 2026 was down from previous years.

The biggest year was 2022, as an antsy, entertainment-starved populace headed back into venues. This year’s crowd was “roughly the same as the past three years.”

On With The Show

Saturday’s 75-minute Poorhouse show was a communal confab, gathering many of those who played on the 1994 CD, The Poorhouse Sessions Vol. 1.

That CD included 19 tracks by budding musicians who mostly hung out at The Sugar Shack (motto: “We may not be fast…but we’re sloppy!!!”), the coffee spot Alyssa Winslow Faulkner opened in 1994 on University Ave, in the shadow of UMass Lowell’s North Campus. By night, they played out or recorded.

Stevenson and Pittman took over the weekly open mic at The Last Safe & Deposit Co., the Merrimack Street bar.

Soon, young musicians were flocking there to play. Jen Kearney, a freshman UMass Lowell music major, showed up with her first song.

School was work. This was play.

Using “a crappy fake ID,” 19-year-old Kearney became a regular at the open mic. “It was so fun. It was easy to go before social media, to just see your friends and make music because there wasn’t that distraction.”

Stevenson and Pittman, who had formed The Shods, decided to commit the community to tape. Pittman’s father had a bunch of tube equipment at home. It became part playground, part classroom. A lab. The room in his parents’ Tewksbury home became a studio.

Inspired by Colin Escott’s writing about the workings of Sam Phillips’ Sun Studios in Memphis, they figured out how to mic a room to capture different configurations of players. Folks gathered to listen to records to see how various studios – Chicago’s Chess, Stax in Memphis, Abbey Road.

“We had to know—how did they do that?” recalls Pittman. “We had that mentality that we didn’t know anything until we knew everything about a song…We always looked backwards.”

At the time, record companies were invading U.S. cities to sign fresh talent – Seattle for grunge, Minneapolis for Princely funk, Athens, Ga. to breathe in the chem trails of R.E.M.

“I knew there was never going to be some record company coming to Lowell,” says Pittman. “So we said, let’s make our own thing.”

The musicians backed one another. Pittman, Stevenson and whoever else was around.

One song per day. That was the rule. Never more than one song and they’d work past midnight if needed. Everything in mono. No overdubs.

“The thing is, you only got one shot, just like life,” says Pittman.

Kearney, who now teaches piano, voice and guitar and maintains a recording and performing career. “It was what I loved doing. It just lit me up. I knew that was what I wanted to do. It gave me direction that nothing else did.”

She is featured on three songs on the Poorhouse CD, one solo and two with Rick Fuller as Ricker & Jen.

“I can still listen to that CD,” says Kearney, who was also among the artists featured in the documentary Beautiful Was the Fight, about women musicians in the Boston community. “It was like Lowell itself. Non-pretentious and not following trends.”

Kearney closed out Saturday evening’s Town and The City slate at The Lass Stop with her band.

“I consider myself really fortunate to have been there when this happened,” says Frank Morey, whose bluesy growl has been spread across several CDs and echoed from many stages. “I got lifetime friends out of it. A bunch of us still write and perform. Jen Kearney is doing the best work of her life now. Melvern Taylor is an amazing songwriter.” Taylor, also known as Nick Orfanedes, made it to The Worthen following an afternoon gig in Maynard.

“It was all like lightning in a bottle,” Morey, 53, says. “There was character to it and commonality, love for how ‘50s rock and roll got made. Scott and Kevin had an encyclopedic knowledge and passion for music. Me? I could hardly get a third chord into anything I wrote. But we all learned from one another.”

With his long white beard and crumpled fedora, Morey serves up the second number of the night at the Worthen reunion, Jimmy Reed’s “Baby What You Want Me to Do,” Stevenson falling in with searing blues riffs. Morey followed with his own infectious “Blame it on the Devil,” plenty of folks singing along.

Donny McHale is a constant on guitar and backing vocals. He does an impassioned version of his “Mishawum.”

Two days later, he is in Ireland where his band The McCritters, will play a pair of gigs and record a bit in a studio in Derry.

Jenny Riddle died last August 15, so her niece, Amber Riddle, sang two Riddle songs, backed by her aunt’s longtime band The Gents.

The Invaders, Pittman and Stevenson’s rockabilly band, played Saturday, too, both songs from the Poorhouse CD – The Chantays’ Pipeline, lurching into Tiny Bradshaw’s “The Train Kept A-Rollin’.” The crowd bellows the chorus.

The finished with the cool-cat sound of “Look at the Birds.”

The Shods ripped through two songs, rocking hard on “Mill City” like an exclamation point.

It all lurched to a close with a singalong of Bill Ralston’s “Cat & Dog,” honoring the late singer,

“He was this cool old guy with this great song,” says Pittman. “He came to open mic night and we just took to him.”

“We played great, like the old days,” says Pittman after the show. “Everyone played on everyone else’s songs and that was what I was really hoping for.”

The Deliriants. Photo courtesy of Matt Lambert

The Deliriants

This is it.

The Deliriants, the Lowell band who released a single incredibly good power pop CD in 1999 and hadn’t played together in a decade, were putting a period on their history.

They would do it in the same Market Street room they’d last played. Back then it was Uncharted, now it’s Thirsty First.

Word got out and the faithful got busy, selling out the show in advance.

Life goes on, says singer/guitarist George Zacharakis. Kids. Jobs. Sometimes, they mix. His daughter, Paige Davis, is making a run at a music career in Nashville. Sometimes, when she needs a guitar player, he’ll fly down to pick.

People move on. Each Deliriant plays with other bands, steadily or occasionally. The band’s drummer, Sean Burgess, lives in L.A. So you do it less and then even less. Then not at all.

This May 2 gig in Lowell would close the book.

“I knew about the Town and The City, and that Chris (Porter) had been doing it for a few years and that it was pretty cool,” says Zacharakis, 57, who lives in Pepperell. “I reached out and asked is there any chance at all? Chris used to book us decades ago into Mama Kin and Bunratty’s. And I thought, if we get 20 people, it’ll be fun.”

Porter agreed.

The band sold shirts touting this one show. Got their CD up on streaming platforms. Beefed up their social media.

Burgess flew in Thursday. They squeezed in two rehearsals.

A few minutes before showtime, a black lab ambles through the crowd, outfitted in a Jennifer Tefft t-shirt. The place was packed.

At 5:04 the band – Zacharakis, Burgess, bassist John Couture and lead guitarist John DiCenso – climbed onstage and plugged in.

Zacharakis looked out and saw people he hadn’t seen set eyes on in 30 years. Folks who were big fans from the old days. Friends from his college days at Bentley.

“One person,” he notes later, “flew out from San Diego for this show.”

For the next 56 minutes, beginning with “Plunger” and closing with an encore cover of Nirvana’s “Molly’s Lips,” the Deliriants crafted a set of tight power pop bliss and driving rock, a dozen songs where one could hear the influences of Big Star and Cheap Trick, but also Soundgarden and other Seattle bands, especially when DiCenso unleashed searing leads. A cover of Bob Marley’s “Redemption Song” sounded more like the Byrds than reggae.

But this is all Deliriants. The crowd roars approval. Maybe some relief that they are this good after this long.

“Not bad for a bunch of old guys,” Zacharakis says between songs, smiling.

And when the band played “Simple,” in memory of the original drummer Michael Comeau, lost to cancer in 2023, Zacharakis slipped in a few lines of The Beatles’ “Tomorrow Never Knows.”

They closed the regular set with Couture’s bass rumble kicking off a cover of The Smithereens’ “Blood and Roses.”

The place went nuts.

And now?

“I honestly don’t know,” said Zacharakis the next day. “We’ve been getting texts and emails and calls since the show. Maybe we do this again? We didn’t expect all of…this. So we don’t know what it all means.”

It means you do only have one life. And tomorrow never knows.